I’m on my way to Washington DC with 20 other Canadian climate activists, to join forces with 330 Americans from across the United States who are concerned that future generations will inherit a harsh and unforgiving world because of the climate crisis. The Citizens Climate Lobby diaspora collecting in D.C. intends to
Continue readingTag: Energy/climate
350 or bust: The Harper Government: Making The North Pole Safe, For Oil Companies & You
The Alberta tar sands aren’t only environmentally friendly, they’re good for the ozone layer, they will stop illiteracy and alleviate erectile dysfunction; and that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg! Don’t believe me? The Canadian federal government can’t stop gushing over them, so they must be out-of-this-world amazing! *
Continue reading350 or bust: First Nations & Tar Sands: “Our Backs Are To The Wall”
From the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance: * More links: Indigenous Environmental Network Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance NoKXL Tar Sands Action
Continue reading350 or bust: Keystone XL: Nightmare In The Making
* Think it can’t happen? Remember Mayflower Arkansas, where residents of a residential suburb woke up to a sea of dirty oil around their homes. More links: Alberta Oil Spill: Up To 3,000 Barrels Spill Near Red Deer River Reports Plains Midstream Canada Alberta Oil Spill Will Take Months To
Continue reading350 or bust: The Obama Tar Sands Pipeline
Is the Keystone XL pipeline really what President Obama wants to leave as his legacy, for future generations to remember him by – and curse him for? * Meanwhile climate destabilization continues as unabated as our carbon dioxide emissions: Czech PM Declares Emergency As Floods Threaten Prague: Czech Prime Minister Petr
Continue reading350 or bust: No More “Nice Guy”: Canada’s Democracy & Reputation Tarred
It turns out Canada’s reputation is getting as toxic as the Alberta tar sands tailings ponds: * Some more facts: Canadian federal taxpayers subsidize the oil industry $1.38 billion a year. And that’s not counting your Province’s subsidies to the oil industry. The International Energy Agency says up to two
Continue reading350 or bust: Canadian Oil Waste Blackens Detroit
* The Koch brothers are about their usual dirty business, this time in Detroit: WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire
Continue reading350 or bust: Goodbye Fossil Fuels: Rejecting Scarcity & Embracing Abundance
It’s TED Talk Tuesday on 350orbust, and today’s talk, like last week’s, is from TEDx Sydney. Danny Kennedy,Founder and President of Sungevity. Before starting Sungevity Kennedy spent decades campaigning with Greenpeace; in this talk he discusses how profit can save the planet rather than destroying it. * Sungevity: The Life
Continue reading350 or bust: Harper’s House of Cards Disintegrating Under Weight of Conservative Senators
* We are living in interesting times, as the saying goes. Here in Canada, the house of cards that is the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper is starting to self-destruct; the only surprising thing to me is that it took this long to happen. The Harper government is throwing
Continue reading350 or bust: B.C. Votes Against Its Future
I don’t live in Canada’s most westerly province, but I know that British Columbians pride themselves in their slogan, “Beautiful British Columbia”. It is a province of vast wilderness, ancient mountains, and pristine waters, although its beauty has been marred in recent years by the pine-beetle-destroyed pine trees covering vast
Continue reading350 or bust: Scientists To Harper Government: It’s Time For Grown Up Conversation on Climate Change
This week twelve climate scientists and energy experts penned a letter to Canada’s Natural Resources (aka “Oil”) Minister, Joe Oliver, to express their concern about his ongoing support for building new pipelines and expanding fossil fuel production in face of the threat of climate change. Mr. Oliver was an international
Continue reading350 or bust: Betting The Farm On Hazardous Pipelines With Poor Track Records
* Ready or not, painful or not, we are in the middle of a huge shift from an oil dependent economy to one that is run on renewables, the Great Transition. Our governments and the corporations that control them – the people and structures that have become out-of-this-world wealthy from
Continue reading350 or bust: Carbon Polluters Have Pushed True Cost of Their Pollution Onto The Rest Of Us For Too Long
* Posted on March 12, 2013 on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Facebook page: We pay for carbon pollution in far too many ways. Today, Rep. Henry Waxman, Rep. Blumenauer, Senator Schatz, and I introduced a carbon fee discussion draft. Our goal is to begin a collaborative process that results in legislation
Continue reading350 or bust: Warning: Use Of This Fuel Product Contributes To Climate Change & Species Extinction
Canadian lawyer, Robert Shirkey, is Executive Director of a new nonprofit organization, Our Horizon, that has launched an ambitious and well-coordinated campaign to have warning labels placed on every gasoline pump in this country This can be done, the campaign asserts, by having the 4,000 municipalities in Canada pass bylaws
Continue reading350 or bust: This Earth Day, Let’s Focus On Saving Humans
It’s a snowy and cold Earth Day morning in northwestern Ontario. On this Earth Day, Joe Romm over at Think Progress muses about renaming Earth Day – after all, it’s really humans and our civilization that is in peril at this point by our feckless, reckless and cavalier treatment of
Continue reading350 or bust: Next, Kansas Republicans Plan To Outlaw Sunshine
* No matter how hard the fossil fools try to stuff the renewable energy genie back into the bottle (click here to read more about Kansas’s latest back-the-past bill), the green energy economy is growing. For example, in March 2013 the number of Australian homes with solar power systems passed
Continue reading350 or bust: Internalizing the Externalities of Fossil Fuels
It’s time to internalize the externalities of the fossil fuel industry. For far too long, the extremely high price we all pay in the pollution of our “commons” – air, water, and climate, which also affects the health of far too many of us, has been ignored by governments and
Continue reading350 or bust: Let’s Stop Being Fossil Fools, And Just Say No To Bankrolling Climate Change
Via Fossil Free Canada: What do you call an industry that is planning to cook the planet? An industry responsible for destroying land, polluting the air and water, and violating the rights of people around the world? An industry who’s business model means burning over three times the amount of
Continue reading350 or bust: Ending Fossil Fuel’s War On Us And The Planet
I’m on a (low-carbon) holiday for the next while, with little access to a computer, so please accept my apologies for delayed responses or posting of comments. All should be back to normal the last week of March. In the meantime, I scoured my files for some photos and graphics
Continue reading350 or bust: Greedy Lying Bastards: Exposing The Fossil Fools Who Put Profit Before Human Lives
* One of the few-and-far-between perks of being a climate blogger is that occasionally I get access to books and movies before the general public does. This past weekend I got to watch “Greedy Lying Bastards” before it hit movie screens across the U.S. on Monday. Sunday night I, along
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